


To Fulfill Them

by Beguile



Series: Through a Glass, Darkly [3]
Category: Daredevil (TV), Kick-Ass (2010)
Genre: AU, Angst, Daredevil/Kick-Ass Crossover, Emotional Hurt, High Hopes, Language, Spoilers, Takes Place During Penny and Dime, Violence, Weapons, psychopathy, shattered dreams, very little comfort
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-22
Updated: 2017-10-22
Packaged: 2019-01-21 04:23:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,494
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12449619
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Beguile/pseuds/Beguile
Summary: Daredevil isn’t the only vigilante out to save Frank Castle from the Irish.Set during “Penny and Dime.” AU.





	To Fulfill Them

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: the characters and concepts in this story are the property of Marvel and their related affiliates. This is an amateur writing effort meant for entertainment purposes only.
> 
> This fic has been in progress for weeks now. It’s a relief to finally finish it off and post it. Hit-Girl’s interactions with Daredevil’s world are making for some interesting developments in her character. I’m hoping to explore them more where Frank’s involved. If you haven't read them, you should probably check out the first two fics in this series before diving into this one. 
> 
> During this chapter, Mindy mutters the titles of comic books while she’s fighting. This is taken from the source material, where some of her attacks and manoeuvres were drawn from comic books. 
> 
> I purposefully did not write Mindy into Frank’s confession scene in the cemetery for one very good reason: that scene is for him and Matt alone. I didn’t want to mess up the emotional beats between them even if this fic is AU. Besides, Mindy and Matt have their own angst to deal with in this story. 
> 
> The title for this fic is taken from Matthew 5:17: “Do not think I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them.” I felt pulling from the Book of Matthew in this was fitting and provided extra emotional depth for what happens in the end. 
> 
> Readers, lovely Readers, I hope you enjoy this. Thank you for your kind patronage. Cheers.

* * *

 

            A little girl’s heartbeat tap dances amidst the carnage, and why is Matt not surprised? Of course, Hit-Girl’s on the scene. Standing watch over the pile of bloody bodies surrounding the Central Park Carousel.

            She’s quick to defend herself: “They were like this when I got here.” And her heartbeat is a pitter-patter of honesty and admiration, because they were like this when she got here. Someone has been keeping up the good work in her absence.

            Matt is about to tell her to get home, but another heartbeat – softer – derails his thought. Mindy paces a menacing semicircle around the survivor in question, artillery clinking at her sides with every step. “Was just about to ask this guy what happened. Unless you want to do the honours.”

            The guy on the ground spits a mouthful of blood in her direction, and Mindy’s playfulness disappears. She lashes out like a cobra, whipping her pistol against the guy’s face before taking aim at his head. “Three seconds before I start shooting, asshole. What’s it gonna be?”  
  
            “Hit-Girl.”

            She groans. “I haven’t killed him.” _Yet._

            “No,” Matt tells her, “You’re not. Get the gun off him.”  
            Her disappointment is palpable; Matt’s grateful for it. Having Hit-Girl be disappointed in him is a compliment. She groans, rolls her eyes, tears her gun away from the guy like it’s the biggest fucking struggle and no one has ever known struggle quite like her. Typical teenager.

            He holds onto her discontent for as long he can, but it doesn’t last. Mindy’s unhappiness reaches a pitch when Matt kneels down in front of the guy; she thinks he’s going to be nice. But once Matt starts tearing out the answers through groans, keens, and screams, Hit-Girl’s heartbeat gets louder and prouder. It’s the second time she’s been impressed tonight, the second time someone has exceeded her expectations, and frankly, she might like the torture more than the shootout.

* * *

             “Go home,” Matt tells her as they’re leaving the scene, but Mindy’s positively giddy. Her heartbeat is doing cartwheels beneath her hardened exterior.

            “You know I’m not going to do that.”

            “What are you even doing here?”  
  
            “Same thing you are.”

            “No,” Matt rushes in front of her, forcing her to stop. Miraculously, Mindy lets him, but the way she taps her foot suggests there’s only so long she’ll tolerate the indignity. “Jackson Heights is 30 minutes on public transit.”

            She laughs a little. “Look who finally did his homework.”

            “You beat me here. You were already in the neighbourhood. Why?”  
  
            Mindy huffs. “Major player flew in from Ireland looking to settle the score with the Punisher. Figured I should be here when shit hit the fan.”  
  
            “To watch it all go down.”

            Her gaze is a knife through his chest even as her pulse betrays her. What the hell is she hiding? “Something like that.”

            Matt leaves that for another time. He tries speaking her language. “These guys are good enough to take the Punisher. They’re going to be more than a match for you.”

            “Speak for yourself,” she counters.

            “I’m not asking.”

            “ _You’re stalling_. Get your ass on my level and grow a pair, Mur-cock, before Frank Castle ends up having all the fun tonight.”

            Matt glowers at her. They are wasting time, and the cops aren’t going to be able to handle the Irish on their own, least of all if Punisher is on-scene when they arrive. He isn’t keen on dragging a child into a warzone, but it’s not like Mindy is about to walk away.  

            “No killing,” he declares.  

            She folds her arms across her bulletproof chest, nudging her chin forward as she raises the stakes: “Can we have a no bitching rule too?”

            “I’m serious.”  
  
            “So am I,” Mindy replies.

            “Now who’s stalling?”  
  
            She throws up her hands in defeat. “Fine. No killing. Let’s go.” And then, as she storms past him, “ _Pussy_.”

* * *

            Mindy falls into position at the edge of the archway into the tunnel without being asked as Matt charges on ahead to the opposite side, clacking a Billy against the wall on his way past. Thank God the average person can’t hear heartbeats; Mindy’s is shelling up a storm, a pre-emptive strike against their opponents.

            She only gets louder when Matt issues another strike with his club. Her lips curl over her teeth into a wild and audible smile. “Dumbass,” she whispers, but hell if she isn’t racing down the corridor behind him a second later, eager to join in on the fight his dumb ass started.

            Matt knows Mindy is adaptable. That she can size an opponent up in milliseconds, take advantage of their weaknesses. He has her pegged as an incomparable soloist, never a partner. But no sooner has the battle started than Mindy falls into step alongside him. A soloist out of necessity, eager for a partner when the opportunity arises. Overjoyed, in fact, for the company.

            They make quick work of the group in the hallway. Matt’s fast; Mindy’s faster. She breaks the laws of physics and bones with the same cruel efficiency. What she lacks in size, she makes up for by using her opponents: swinging and spring-boarding off them as they fall to the floor. She uses Matt similarly. When he goes high, she goes low, skidding across the floor to slash a pair of Achilles’s tendons; and when he ends up in a crouch to kick a guy’s legs out from under, Mindy springs off his shoulder, light as a cat, to land on an enemy chest and lay into his face with her fists.

            Every now and then he hears her under her breath - the stuff of comic books, characters and concepts – as she works her way through the Irish. But she leaves them all alive: wounded, concussed; one guy is missing everything from everything from the knee down, but he’s alive.

            They’re chasing down a few stragglers to the back of the compound when Matt’s struck by the joyous thrill of Mindy’s respiration. Her happiness rings out above the heartbeats she’s left behind, over the disappointment she usually carries. Frank called himself geared up that night on the roof, and his heart had the bombastic gravity of a suicide mission, of taking the whole world with him. Mindy’s geared up in a different way, warm and wild and wonderful, like this is the best damn day she’s had in a long time. There’s a childishness in the way she leaps onto him as if for a piggyback ride, right before she springs off again and plants her knife into a guy’s shoulder.

            Frank is waiting in the next room. He slings his makeshift barricade off his back, heartbeat a snarl and tangle at the sight of his rescuers. He breathes raggedly through his broken nose, and to Matt’s senses seems less a man and more a bull about to charge. “The hell is this, Red. The hell is this?”  
  
            Matt scoffs. “Wish I knew, Frank.”

            The atmosphere in the room shifts. Mindy and Frank’s respiration enter discordant rhythms – recognition and frustration and _dominance_ in equal measure - but Matt doesn’t have a chance to deduce why. Footsteps approach them from the hallway behind. “We’ve got company.”

            He hasn’t moved more than a step when a struggle ensues behind him. Frank disarms Hit-Girl in two swift movements. She reacts about as well as expected: with the flick-swish-snap of a butterfly knife, a cut to Punisher’s arm, and a furious slide towards her discarded firearms. Matt goes to throw his club to intervene, but he’s got two of the Irish in the doorway whose knees need breaking. By the time he has them unconscious, Matt finds Frank’s grabbed Mindy by the collar of her bulletproof vest and yanked her clean off the ground. She’s brandished between them like a human shield.

            “Let her go, Frank.”

            But Frank’s not listening. “Ain’t no place for fucking kids.” He’s got her gun in one hand and her in the other, and he drags her like a mother cat carrying its young to cover, shoving her into a wall as more of the cavalry arrives.

            Matt’s aware, during the fight, of another battle occurring simultaneously. Of Mindy lashing out at Frank between opponents and him throwing her aside, getting her the hell out of the shit. “I’ll deal with you later,” he snarls, raising his gun towards a guy he’s just thrown against the wall.

            Metal spirals through the air before clattering against the floor. Matt stops, club raised overhead, to listen. Frank’s unarmed and breathing heavy. Mindy skids across the floor to pick up her thrown butterfly knife, and on the way past says, “No killing, asshole.”

            Matt smirks and gets back to fighting.

            He’s knocking one guy out when he swings around without even knowing what’s happening, before he’s processed what his senses are telling him. Ends up catching the hammer right before Frank brings it down onto a guy’s skull.

            Matt’s hearing jumps briefly to Mindy at the doorway they entered. She sounds different, wrong; her heartbeat is slowing into a pensive crawl. She’s retrieved her guns but hasn’t used them. Instead, they rattle at either of her sides, gripped tightly in her hands but dangling from loose arms. Training coming to accommodate new programming, to accommodate something she’s clearly never thought of before.

            When he returns, Matt’s treated to the sounds of Frank punching the guy’s face in, grumbling about morality, about how all these guys gotta pay.

            Mindy has left the room. Her heartbeat tracks quickly through the complex; her footsteps echo down the hall before suddenly disappearing into stealthy silence. 

            The quiet gives Frank pause. He climbs back onto his feet and takes a step in her direction, muttering, “The hell did you find her, Red?”

            Matt hears a door opening far off: an exit. Mindy’s taking her own way out for some reason. “Hell’s Kitchen.” Frank scoffs. _Of course_. No place the devils love more. “Come on.”

* * *

             Leaving Frank with Mahoney and his partner comes with a weight Matt can’t get off his chest. Not regret, not guilt, but a weight nonetheless. One that begs so many questions, each one more painful than the last, about where the Punisher came from, what bullet bore him into this world.

            The processions of paramedics and cops, the radio chatter; the electric swing of lights dancing across the graves, it gives the cemetery an eerie quality, cuts through that peaceful quiet that cradled him and Frank earlier in the dark. Matt finds he misses the hallowed cricks of nighttime sounds swelling amidst the spaces between tombstones. He misses that stolen moment between himself and the Punisher, where neither of them were in chains and even though his cowl never left his head, where Matt felt that neither of them were wearing masks.

            A young girl’s heartbeat appears through the din from behind him, accompanied by a dog who goes from panting to growling at the sight of Matt in costume.

            Frank’s pit bull. Mindy must have retrieved him on her final sweep through the place.

            “What the hell did you do?” Mindy demands, her fury thinly concealed beneath her shock.

            “What had to be done,” Matt replies.

            He dodges the kick she aims to the back of his knee and spins, blocking the series of punches she throws his way next.

            The dog barks. Some of the cops’ heart rates rise in suspicion. Mindy senses it too. She stops throwing punches, shoving at him instead before backing off. Barely. “We don’t hand each other over to the cops! That’s, like, Vigilante 101. You’re such an asshole.”

            “He needs to be stopped, Mindy.”  
  
            The sound of her name gets her to start at him again, fast and sharp, her tiny form alive with fury. This bright blaze in the world on fire. The dog growls at them both yet doesn’t intervene, his allegiances torn. He doesn’t have to join in though; Matt’s prepared this time. He knows Mindy, has fought alongside her now. When she goes low, he meets her; when she goes high, he meets her too. He’s about to put her in a lock when she rips a gun out of the holster under her shoulder and points it directly at his chin.

            Matt raises his hands: in surrender, but not anticipation. Mindy’s heartbeat is a series of desperate _I’ll Do It-s_ that reek of the lady doth protest too much. She can’t psyche herself up enough to put a bullet in him.

            But he lets her think that she’s in control, because it’s the only mercy he can offer to her racing pulse, her breaking heart. She was happy tonight, happier than Matt’s ever known her to be.

            “He was gonna die,” Matt reminds her.

            The thought refuels her shaky resolve. She shakes the gun at him a little. “That’s how it’s supposed to end for people like us.”  
            Matt can’t take this. How hard she is, how mean she is. “It doesn’t have to be that way! He’s going to live. They’re going to get him help. I’ll make sure he gets help.”  
  
            She bites down so hard on her bottom lip that Matt smells blood. Mindy corrects and speaks, every word emerging drenched in copper. The dog whimpers and moves a little closer to her side. “You gonna hand me over to the cops too?” she asks.

            Matt doesn’t answer. The thought has crossed his mind.

            She scoffs, knowing the answer without being told. “That night we met, you took me back to your place. Helped me get cleaned up. Sent me home.”  
  
            “That’s different.”

            “Why? Because I wasn’t dying?”

            “Because you’re young. You can change.”  
  
            Mindy gives one cold, dark laugh. “Dude – I’m not going to change.”  
  
            Matt ignores her, and when that fails, he pushes her words down into his memory, getting them out of his head for the time being. “You did tonight,” he reminds her. Reminds himself. “You didn’t kill anyone. And you stopped Frank from killing that guy.”  
  
            At that, Mindy finally lowers her weapon. Her heart lowers into a steady straight line, this lance of sound, that prods at Matt’s chest. She tosses her weapon one last time in his direction before giving up. Of course she isn’t going to shoot him. Mindy has a code as much as Frank. More Vigilante 101. “Yeah, well,” she starts to walk away, “We’ll see about that.”

            The dog tosses his head between Mindy and Matt, torn again. She saves him a moment of indecision by stopping. “Have fun with your whole send-Punisher-to-prison plan. He’s gonna love it in there.” She sighs wistfully, as if she’d love it in there. “Like shooting fish in a barrel.”

            Matt doesn’t dignify that with a response. He lets her summon the dog with a quick, “Come on,” to which the dog miraculously responds, and she and the animal disappear into the night. 

* * *

 

Happy reading!

**Author's Note:**

> Any suggestions for what Mindy will name the dog? I have one in mind, but I’d love to hear your thoughts.


End file.
